Government policy

In Tackling Child Poverty and Improving Life Chances: Consulting on a New Approach, the PSE: UK research team has responded to the consultation on the Field Review’s report, The Foundation Years: Preventing Poor Children Becoming Poor Adults. The response welcomes the emphasis on early years in the Field report but is critical of key aspects of the report, arguing that key elements of the proposed strategy are ‘narrow, partial and highly likely to be ineffective’.

The government’s highly controversial Welfare Reform Bill was finally passed by the House of Lords on 27 February 2012 after peers dropped their final resistance to the controversial measures. The Bill, hailed as ‘historic’ by the Prime Minister, aims to save £18 billion from the annual welfare bill and overhauls most of the benefit system.

Estimates of the numbers expected to be affected by the government’s Housing Benefit Cap have risen in an updated impact assessment by the Department for Work and Pensions, Impact Assessment for the Household Benefit Cap. The latest estimate is that the £26,000 benefit cap will reduce the incomes of 67,000 households, covering 90,000 adults and 220,000 children, in the year 2013/14. This is an increase on the government’s previous estimates of 50,000 households. Benefits for these households are expected to reduce on average by around £83 per week. Nearly 20 per cent of those households losing benefit will lose more than £150 per week.

The modelling suggests that, in the absence of any behavioural response to the policy, the numbers of households affected will rise to 75,000 in 2014/15.

The Coalition government’s proposed ‘reforms’ to the Disability Living Allowance (DLA) lack support and credibility and are ‘highly misleading’, says Responsible Reform, a report written by sick and disabled people, their friends and carers. Based on an analysis of 500 responses to the UK government’s consultation on its planned changes to disability living allowance, this report argues that the decision to reduce DLA expenditure by 20 per cent may have been based on misleading data about the reasons for growth in DLA. It is estimated that the proposed changes could lead to 500,000 disabled people losing entitlement to the benefit. The report found:

David Cameron pledged a network of troubleshooters, along with more targeted support for 120,000 of Britain’s most troubled families, by 2015. Cameron promised families one dedicated worker rather than a ‘string of well-meaning, disconnected officials’.

Under the government’s proposals, families need to meet five out of seven criteria – including truanting children, parents with addiction and antisocial behaviour – to be classified as ‘troubled’.

The government is diverting £448m from existing departmental budgets over four years to help pay for a network of people who will identify families in need of help, make sure they get access to the right services and ensure that action is taken.

Tackling child poverty by boosting family income through benefits is a narrow approach that ‘looks set to have failed’ said Ian Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, in a major speech. The speech followed the government’s Autumn Statement, which included welfare measures that on the government’s own projections would lead to an increase in child poverty – another signal of the government’s intentions to develop a new approach to poverty less dependent on benefits.

Duncan Smith claimed there are problems with officially classifying child poverty as a family on 60 per cent or less than the median income, as this had pushed governments into introducing policies with ‘perverse incentives’. He argued that this target created a ‘poverty plus a pound’ approach – where authorities did only enough to keep some families just above the 60 per cent mark without really changing lives, while those at the very bottom could be left behind.

Warning of six more years of austerity, the Chancellor’s package of measures included a number of provisions that, on the Treasury’s predictions, are likely to increase the numbers of children in poverty.

The government reforms to incapacity benefit will result in severe hardship for hundreds of thousands of households living outside the south of England, according to research published by Sheffield Hallam University in Incapacity Benefit Reform.

The report by Christina Beatty and Steve Fothergill of the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research finds:

In Social Mobility and Child Poverty, the PSE: UK research team is highly critical of the Coalition government’s social mobility strategy and, in particular, its claim that the best way to tackle intergenerational mobility is to break the ‘the transmission of disadvantage from one generation to the next’. The PSE paper dismisses the idea that poverty is ‘transmitted’ between generations as ‘simply incorrect’ and argues that the best way to tackle intergenerational disadvantage and low social mobility is to eradicate poverty among children and adults.

The PSE: UK research team has produced a detailed response to the government’s call for evidence on their strategy on social mobility and child poverty. While welcoming aspects of the strategy and the overall aims, the PSE: UK team argue that the strategies fail to tackle the multiple structural causes of lack of social mobility and underestimate the importance of material deprivation. Key questions asked in the call for evidence were:

Question 1: What do you think are the links between social mobility and child poverty?

The PSE: UK team welcome the suggestion of increased emphasis on the early years, the availability and quality of services for families and children and improving parenting but argue that parenting quality is not a primary cause of poverty in the UK or in other countries. Parenting skills and poverty both have important but independent effects on children’s outcomes.

Pages

PSE:UK is a major collaboration between the University of Bristol, Heriot-Watt University, The Open University, Queen's University Belfast, University of Glasgow and the University of York working with the National Centre for Social Research and the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency. ESRC Grant RES-060-25-0052.